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The Privatization of the Holocaust: Memory, Historiography, and Politics

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The Privatization of the Holocaust: Memory, Historiography, and Politics Daniel Gutwein The Privatization of the Holocaust: Memory, Historiography, and Politics ABSTRACT Politically and culturally the collective memory of the Holocaust plays a key role in constructing Israeli identity. Three main periods can be discerned in Holocaust memory in Israel: divided memory, nationalized memory, and privatized memory. This article discusses the privatization of the Zionist- nationalized memory of the Holocaust in Israel during the 1980s and 1990s as an ideological product of the privatization revolution through which Israel has gone. The article focuses on the role played by Post-Zionism in privatizing Holocaust memory by depicting Zionist ideology and Israeli politics that portrayed the nationalized memory as oppressive. In privatiz- ing Holocaust memory, Post-Zionism reaffirmed its nature as the meta- ideology of the Israeli privatization revolution and dismantling of the welfare state. HOLOCAUST, MEMORY, AND IDENTITY It is generally accepted that politically and culturally the collective memory of the Holocaust plays a key role in constructing Israeli identity.1 Collective memory is a presentation of the past formed by com- peting memory agents that manipulate the past and construct conflicting memories in the service of rival ideologies and political interests.2 Likewise, in Israel, Holocaust memory has undergone several transformations cor- responding to different phases of nation building that have been reflected in the remodeling of Israeli collective identity.3 Three main periods can be discerned in Holocaust memory in Israel: the divided memory period, the nationalized memory period, and the privatized memory period, each 36 The Privatization of The Holocaust • 37 characterized by a dominant memory whose hegemony is challenged by competing marginalized memories. The period of “divided memory” of the Holocaust begins when its horrors were first uncovered, continues through the struggle for statehood and creation of national institutions, and ends with the Eichmann Trial. This period was marked by dichotomous perception of the Holocaust: emotional identification with the victims, their torment and suffering, and criticism of their docile behavior. During this period Holocaust memory was constructed as a means of cementing the Zionist ethos in the struggle for statehood. The victims’ suffering was used to foster recognition of the Jewish people’s right to a state according to Zionist ideology. At the same time, while the few ghetto fighters were elevated to heroic status in Israel, their courage was used to disparage the mass of Diaspora Jews who went to their death “like lambs to the slaughter”. Thus, divided memory incor- porated the survivors into the Israeli Ashkenazi hegemony, but at the same time it constructed them as its “others”. The beginnings of the “nationalized memory” period is marked by the Eichmann Trial, when empathy with the annihilated Diaspora and Holo- caust victims was unreservedly adopted by Zionist ideology and the lesson of “never again” became the cornerstone of the Israeli ethos of indepen- dence. This ideological shift intensified after the Six-Day War, when the ini- tial contradiction between “Israeli” and “Jew” gradually began to fade and the two became complementary concepts. Holocaust memory suppressed the idea of “negation of the Diaspora”—one of Zionism’s basic assump- tions—and drew a parallel between Jewish and Israeli fate. The Holocaust lesson was used to imbue the sense of “the whole world is against us” and to legitimize hawkish politics, but at the same time it was downplayed so as not to interfere with Israeli economic and political interests—such as relations with Germany. The period of the “privatized memory”4 of the Holocaust begins in the 1980s. It was one of the ideological products of the privatization revo- lution that Israel went through and it was influenced by the political and moral dilemmas involved in the First Lebanon War and the first Intifada. Privatized memory turned the Holocaust into a personal experience that is concerned with the fate of Jews as individuals: victims, displaced persons (DPs), survivors, and the ‘second generation’. One of the outstanding expressions of privatized memory was the replacement of the ghetto upris- ing with its national-collective message as the main focus of Holocaust memory, with individualized commemoration epitomized by the poem “Unto Every Person There is a Name.” 38 • israel studies, volume 14, number 1 The privatization of Holocaust memory is one of the cornerstones of Post-Zionist ideology. Post-Zionists claim that the Israeli hegemony has exploited the nationalized memory of the Holocaust to justify the nega- tion and suppression of its “others”: the ultra-Orthodox, Oriental Jews, and Israeli Arabs.5 The Holocaust and its aftermath, according to the Post-Zionist canon exposed the underlying conflict between the Zionist establishment and the individual Jew. The alleged preference for the devel- opment of the Yishuv over the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust, the manipulation of the survivors’ suffering in the struggle for statehood, and the erasure of the survivors’ cultural identity in Israel—all of these abuses, the Post-Zionists charge, reveal the oppressive nature of Zionist ideology and Israeli politics. Tom Segev’s The Seventh Million: Israelis and the Holocaust played a major role in the privatization of Holocaust memory. It attained promi- nence not only as one of the most comprehensive versions of privatized memory of the Holocaust, but also as one of the most effective agents for its circulation. The concluding paragraph sums up the spirit of the book: The fear that overwhelmed Israel at the outbreak of the Gulf War was pal- pable. For the first time since the establishment of the state, fear centered on the fate of the individual, his family and property on the homefront and not on collective existence . The war did not hit Israelis on the front or in public bomb shelters: it was experienced as they hid in their homes. It was an experience shared by everyone; radio and television broadcasts heightened the sense of national togetherness . Although everyone existed under the same threat and [was] gripped by the same fear, once the air-raid sirens sounded their blood-curdling wail, society seemed to disintegrate, each person sat with his family in the safe room, each person alone inside his gas mask. Thousands of Tel-Avivians left their homes like refugees and fled to safe areas in the country’s hinterland . Those who remained—men women and children— hugged one another and waited helplessly for the final blow. Never had so many Israelis undergone so Jewish an experience.6 The privatization of Holocaust memory redefined the parameters of the term “Holocaust” in Israeli public and academic discourse. From a historical description of the Jewish experience under Nazi occupation, the Holocaust has been transformed into an overall concept for numerous emotion-charged and morally ambiguous themes that focus more on the Holocaust’s impact on Israeli society, politics, and culture, and on Israelis and individuals. The Privatization of The Holocaust • 39 While ideologically, privatized memory claims to underscore the uni- versal lesson of the Holocaust, in practice, privatization has transformed the Holocaust into an essentially Israeli matter.7 Privatized memory has highlighted questions relating to the Holocaust’s encounter with Zionism and the Yishuv and Israel, and it has turned the Holocaust into a platform for discussing power relations between Israeli hegemony and its “others”, mainly the Palestinians. As an intra-Israeli polemics, the privatized memory received wide media coverage and aroused greater public interest than the history of the Holocaust itself.8 Divided and nationalized memories of the Holocaust, despite their differences, defined the Zionist collective identity of the Jewish majority in Israel, while privatized memory has been used to undermine the legitimacy of Zionist identity and the collective it defined. The privatization of Holo- caust memory has been part of the privatization revolution that Israel has been undergoing since the late 1970s. The struggle over Holocaust memory gathered momentum with the intensification of the Israeli privatization revolution, when, along with the redistribution of economic and political power, the privatization process restructured Israeli collective identity as well as Holocaust memory. Accordingly, the reasons for the privatization of Holocaust memory should not be sought in its contents, as most analyses do, but in the economic, social, political, and cultural factors that informed Israel’s privatization revolution. This article examines the privatization of Holocaust memory in Israel in the 1980s and 1990s, by exploring a number of representative texts and discussing the relationship between the privatization of Holocaust memory and the Post-Zionist struggle to adapt Israeli collective memory to the assumptions of the privatization regime.9 MEMORY CLEANSING In the summer of 1986 the monthly Politika—published by the liberal left- wing party “Civil Rights and Peace Movement” (“Ratz”)—devoted a special issue to “Israelis and the Holocaust: How to Remember and How Not to Forget”. Criticizing the nationalized memory of the Holocaust, Politika preempted privatized memory, giving voice to most of the arguments that would stand in the forefront of the struggle for shaping Holocaust collec- tive memory in the 1990s.10 It contended that the
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